Pabst Calls It a Comeback

How PBR rose through word-of-mouth campaign

From 1978 to 2001, Pabst
Blue Ribbon was a brand in decline. It wasn’t hip, it hadn’t yet developed that
retro cachet we all know it to possess today, and it certainly wasn’t selling.
That all changed when Pabst Brewing Co. launched a word-of-mouth marketing
campaign that prompted the national resurgence of the iconic American beer.

“We’re going on 10 years
now that this trend started, and it has had unbelievable staying power,” says
Neal Stewart, who worked for Pabst from 2000 to 2006. As brand manager, and
later marketing director, Stewart worked with a team of brand ambassadors to
direct and create the PBR re-branding campaign—a campaign that employed an
unobtrusive approach to marketing that appealed to the consumers who had begun
to adopt the brand in 2000 and 2001 in the Northwest.

These initial adopters
were bike messengers in Portland,
Ore.—a group that, according to
Stewart, had created a subculture that didn’t include supporting mainstream
brands. It was unlikely that they had ever seen a PBR commercial, as Pabst
Brewing stopped advertising in the early ’80s; rather, they likely had grown up
being inundated with ads from big breweries in the ’80s and ’90s.

“It didn’t have the
baggage and it didn’t have the stigma of being this big corporation,” Stewart
explains. “People thought of it as this little, tiny company trying to make
ends meet.”

It was important to the
growth of the brand that consumers continue to feel that PBR was the true
alternative choice to mainstream counterparts.

“I don’t want to
overcomplicate what we did,” Stewart says. “It was mainly finding people who
were really supportive of the brand and supporting their efforts.”

Pabst Blue Ribbon began
sponsoring bike messenger races and scooter rallies. While bigger beer brands,
like Miller (now MillerCoors) and Anheuser-Busch, were sponsoring large concert
venues and festivals, Pabst Blue Ribbon focused on smaller venues and low-level
clubs across the country, solidifying the brand as a supporter not only of
independent live music, but of hipster culture in general. From bike messenger
to bike messenger, and music fan to music fan, the buzz created by the
word-of-mouth campaign generated sales in 2002, resulting in PBR’s first volume
increase since 1978.

“We tracked it state by
state, and you could literally see it start in the Northwest and then jump to
the East Coast, and then it slowly did make its way to the middle of the
country,” Stewart says. “Milwaukee
was a different market for us, though, because the brewery used to be there,
and there was a huge backlash against Pabst… I wouldn’t say that Milwaukee was behind the
trend, because of the late adopters. But maybe it was slightly late, because
there was baggage with the brand back then.”

The “baggage” was the
closing of Pabst’s Milwaukee
brewery in 1996, after a 152-year presence in the city. According to Milwaukee historian and
author John Gurda, the anger felt by many Milwaukeeans was directed at the
irresponsible decisions made by the brewery’s ownership, S&P Co.

“I had been a loyal
Pabst drinker for 30 years,” Gurda says, “and I wouldn’t touch the stuff
because I was angry. And I don’t think I was alone. I think that there were a
lot of people that were really miffed that this brand had been taken over by
robber barons who drove it into the ground, ruining a proud heritage.”

After shutting down the
remainder of its breweries nationwide, S&P Co. began contracting with
MillerCoors (then Miller) to brew its portfolio in 2001. To Gurda, this softens
some of what he refers to as the “psychological reluctance” of re-embracing
PBR, because “it’s money, it’s jobs and it’s brewed here,” he says.